Flux Effects Liquid Ambience Atmospheric Reverb

Sometimes, a pedal comes through the office here that is hard to describe, or put into one specific category, as it makes so many different sounds that it almost seems an injustice to limit its description to one lone genre of effects. Such is the case with the Liquid Ambience from Flux Effects. Labeled as an “Atmospheric Reverb”, this blue beauty is capable of a wide array of sonic textures and gorgeous soundscapes, thus making it hard to define it as just a reverb pedal. Nonetheless, let’s check it out and see what it holds in store for us!

A Mix control start us off, blending the wet effect with your guitar’s dry signal. The dry through is all analog, keeping your original tone in tact, plus there’s an internal switch that will balance these 2 signals, letting you take the dry all the way out if you so desire. The truly unique Evolve control comes next, one of my favorite pieces of the Liquid Ambience. This knob takes part of the output signal and brings it back into the musical fold, creating a layered effect, which is controllable via this knob, letting you blend in as much or as little of this re-voiced layer as you see fit. It’s innovations like this Evolve knob that make pedals such as this so much fun to test and incorporate into any rig, and it has been done masterfully here.

The Space knob essentially controls the reverb section of this pedal, with each side being labeled “Tight” and “Wide”, resulting in a huge range of spatial opportunity for you to take advantage of. Reminiscent of your typical Hall reverb sounds, this pedal produces anything but, instead exuding a totally different sound and feel than most reverbs would dare dream about. This knob, and the other controls, too, really, work in conjunction with the final knob on the Liquid Ambience, labeled simply Voice. Here, you can choose to work within a range of tones for Octave and Sub Octave, Fifth and Sub Fifth, or the super cool Bend mode, each with it’s own unique sound and spectrum to work within, and the experimentation of these 3 with the other controls will take you on an incredible journey through time and space, one you just may not return from.

Wait, this isn’t enough for you? Well, you’re in luck, as the crew at Flux Effects didn’t want to stop there, either. A second footswitch entitled More gives you just that: hold this guy down, and your Evolve level gets pushed PAST its maximum by a whopping 50%! If the Evolve knob is set to zero, this switch becomes a Manual control of that setting, letting you determine exactly how much of the effect signal gets recirculated back into the pedal. You can also switch the normal True Bypass mode internal to a buffered bypass, allowing for luscious trails to carry on long after you hit that Bypass switch to turn it off. As for the some of the inner workings, the Liquid Ambience uses BiFET op-amps for their super low noise JFET inputs and high output drive capability, film capacitors preserve input tone and Alps pots ensure smooth and clean parameter control.

Whew! Again, this is one of those pedals that you really must sit down with for yourself and see what it does (if you can snag one, these puppies fly of the shelves!), but hopefully the video below will offer you a bit of insight as to what this beast is truly capable of doing. I can’t thank Michael and the team in New Zealand at Flux Effects for shooting this guy over to us to check out – this is one of those pedals that really blows your mind, even before you plug it in, as the attention to the packaging was so well thought-out, I knew what the box contained was going to be magical. If you have the rare opportunity to grab one of these, do yourself a favor and take the plunge – it just might change the way you look at the music you’ve been creating.